“The US and its minions among European allies have destroyed any foundations of international order from their unabated wars and campaigns of mass murder. Their corporate-capitalist plunder has eviscerated the planet.”

Western Collapse… Scapegoating Trump & Putin

Former US President Barack Obama was in South Africa last week for the centennial anniversary marking the birth of the late Nelson Mandela. Obama delivered a speech warning about encroaching authoritarianism among nations and the “rise of strongman politics”.

Coming on the heels of the summit in Helsinki between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, media reports assumed that Obama was taking a swipe at these two leaders for supposed growing authoritarianism.

Obama’s casting of the “strongman” as a foreboding enemy to democracy is a variant of the supposed threat of “populism” that Western political establishments also seem concerned about.

Trump, Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, Italy’s Salvini, Victor Orban in Hungary and Sebastian Kurz in Austria, among many others, are all lumped together as “strongman politics”, “populists” or “authoritarians”.

Here we are not trying to defend the above-mentioned political leaders or to make out that they are all virtuous democrats.

The point rather is to debunk the false narrative that there is some kind of dichotomy in modern politics between those who, on one hand, are supposedly virtuous, liberal, democratic, multilateralists, and on the other hand, the supposedly sinister “strongman”, “authoritarian”, or “populist”.

In Obama’s pompous depiction of world political trends, people like him are supposedly the epitome of a civilized, democratic legacy that is now under threat from Neo-fascists who are darkly rising to destroy an otherwise happy world order. That world order, it is presumed, was up to now guided by the magnificence of American political leadership. In short, the “Pax Americana” that prevailed for nearly seven decades following the Second World War.

Following the Helsinki summit, the Western media went full-tilt in hysterics and hyperbole. Trump was assailed for “embracing a dictator” while repudiating Western democratic allies.

In a Washington Post article, the headline screamed: “Is Trump at war with the West?” It was accompanied by a photograph of Trump and Putin, bearing the caption: “The New Front”.

Meanwhile, a New York Times piece editorialized: “His [Trump’s] embrace of Putin is a victory dance on the Euro-American tomb.”

The Western establishment political and media commentary promulgates the notion that the US-led Western order is breaking down because of “populist”, “strongman” Trump. In this alleged assault on the pillars of democracy and rule of law, Trump is being aided and abetted by supposedly nasty, like-minded authoritarians like Russian leader Vladimir Putin, or other nationalistic European politicians.

The premise of this establishment narrative is that all was seemingly salubrious and convivial in the US-led order until the arrival of various renegade-type politicians, like Trump and Putin.

That premise is an absolute conceit and deception. If we look at Obama’s presidency alone, one can see how the supposed guardians of democracy and international order were the very ones who have actually done the most to decimate that order.

Obama, you will recall, was the US president who notched up seven simultaneous overseas wars conducted by American military, arguably without a shred of international legal mandate. Under international law, Obama and other senior officials in his administration should face prosecution for war crimes. He also greatly expanded the executive use of assassination with aerial drones, reckoned to have killed thousands of innocent civilians in several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia, merely on the suspicion of being terrorists.

It was Obama who ramped up the covert war policy of his predecessor GW Bush in Syria, arming and directing terrorist proxies in a failed bid to overthrow the elected government of President Assad. That US-backed covert war in Syria, along with Obama’s overt regime-change war in Libya, largely contributed to the refugee crisis that has destabilized the politics of the European Union.

So here we have the supremely bitter irony. Obama now lectures audiences with his pseudo-gravitas about the specter of strongman politics and xenophobic populism, when in fact it was politicians like Obama who created much of the refugee problems that have given rise to anti-immigrant politics in Europe.

It really is a conceited delusion among US and European establishment politicians, pundits and media that somehow a once virtuous, law-abiding US-led Western order is being eroded by rabble rousers like Trump, Salvini, Orban and so on, all being orchestrated by a “strongman dictator” in the Kremlin.

For the record, Putin, the supposed “strongman” in the Kremlin, warned more than a decade ago in a seminal Munich speech that the international order was being eroded by rampant American unilateralism and disregard for law in its pursuit of illegal wars for US hegemony. That was at the height of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which killed more than one million civilians and forced millions more into infernal destitution.

In truth, the Pax Americana that is presumed to have prevailed over the past 70 years was never about order, peace or justice in the world. The notion that the US guided the world with its “moral authority” and maintained stability throughout is one of the most fatuous delusions of modern history.

From the atomic holocaust in Japan and during subsequent decades, the US has waged wars non-stop in almost every year, whether from covert operations in Latin America and Africa, to full-on genocidal wars in Indochina. The past quarter-century has seen an acceleration and expansion of these US wars, sometimes with the assistance of its military axis in NATO, largely because Washington viewed that its license to kill for mass murder was unchecked after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is the real dynamic underlying why the Western order is now seen to be collapsing. The US and its minions among European allies have destroyed any foundations of international order from their unabated wars and campaigns of mass murder. Their corporate-capitalist plunder has eviscerated the planet.

The chaos from these wars, including economic impacts of gargantuan costs to Western populations, has created social conditions which engender politics of protest, anti-establishment, anti-austerity, anti-war, anti-immigration, and so on.

If the supposed order is shaking for the establishment political class and its flunkies like Barack Obama it is because of their own criminal depredations – depredations which have been going on for decades under the guise of Pax Americana.

The writers at Monthly Review had it so presciently right years ago, when they analyzed the actual Western order as “Pox Americana” – a diseased affliction.

This is the historical context which accounts for why US and European establishments are decrying “strongmen” and “populists”. They are essentially scapegoating others for the historic failure of institutionalized Western criminality led primarily by “democratic” regimes in Washington.

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands out as the one international leader who put a brake on the US-led criminal assault on global peace. Putin’s stand first emerged with his landmark speech in Munich in 2007, and then came into clear expression when he helped put an end to the US-led covert criminal war on Syria.

That is why Putin is so vilified and demonized by the Western establishment. The poachers have been stopped from raiding the globe, and in their exasperation, they have whipped up all sorts of disparaging epithets like “strongman” and “authoritarian”.

No one has practiced more fascist-style criminality and brutality towards law and peace than the polite-sounding pseudo-democrats who have been in office for the past 70 years in the US and Europe.

The Western political establishment and its elite-driven capitalism is rotten to the core. Always has been. Its own erosion and oozing corruption is the source of the putrid smell that it now wishes to waft away by scapegoating others.

“I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”

By Maria Popova

July 29, 2018

“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Zadie Smith wrote in her spectacular essay on optimism and despair. The illusion of permanent progress inflicts a particularly damning strain of despair as we witness the disillusioning undoing of triumphs of democracy and justice generations in the making — despair preventable only by taking a wider view of history in order to remember that democracy advances in fits and starts, in leaps and backward steps, but advances nonetheless, on timelines exceeding any individual lifetime. Amid our current atmosphere of presentism bias and extreme narrowing of perspective, it is not merely difficult but downright countercultural to resist the ahistorical panic by taking such a telescopic view — lucid optimism that may be our most unassailable form of resistance to the corruptions and malfunctions of democracy.

I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.

Having lived and saved lives through the Civil War, having seen the swell of “vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations,” having witnessed the corrosion of idealism and the collapse of democratic values into corruption and complacency, Whitman still faces a dispiriting landscape with a defiant and irrepressible optimism — our mightiest and most countercultural act of courage, then and now and always:

Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society in our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the subject which I find possessing many good people.

Zooming out of the narrow focus of his cultural moment — as we would be well advised to do with ours — Whitman takes a telescopic perspective of time, progress, and social change, and considers what it really takes to win the future:

The advent of America, the history of the past century, has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities — to this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening — and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something beyond — namely, the sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements… Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will finally make the blood and brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes.

American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices — through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life — must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will morbidly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part — to be its health-element and beauty-element — to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.

“Congress has appropriated $126 billion for Afghanistan reconstruction since Fiscal Year 2002,” wrote Special Inspector General John F. Sopko in testimony delivered in May to the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management. By 2014, he added, inflation-adjusted appropriations for that purpose “had already exceeded the total of U.S. aid committed to the Marshall Plan for rebuilding much of Europe after World War II.”

So much money, spent so fast, inevitably generates many examples of projects poorly or wastefully executed. Afghanistan reconstruction is no exception, as the ongoing work of Sopko’s office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) makes clear. Here are a few of the most head-smackingly absurd.

The $43 Million Gas Station

According to a 2015 SIGAR study, the U.S.-funded Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) “spent nearly $43 million to construct a compressed natural gas (CNG) automobile filling station in the city of Sheberghan, Afghanistan.” A similar station in Pakistan “costs no more than $500,000 to construct,” making the Afghan counterpart some 86 times as expensive. Yet the Department of Defense (DOD) was “unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation, or outcome.”

Those who decided to spend those millions didn’t seem to realize that “Afghanistan lacks the natural gas transmission and local distribution infrastructure necessary to support a viable market for CNG vehicles” or that “the cost of converting a gasoline-powered car to run on CNG may be prohibitive for the average Afghan.”

In summation, the SIGAR study concludes, “it is not clear why TFBSO believed the CNG filling station project should be undertaken.…In fact, an economic impact assessment performed at the request of TFBSO found that the CNG filling station project produced no discernable macroeconomic gains and a discounted net loss of $31 million.”

The ‘Melting’ Practice Range

SIGAR also reported that U.S. Central Command had in 2012 constructed a dry fire range (DFR) in Wardak province for the Afghan Special Police Training Center, at a cost of nearly half a million dollars.

The project “replicates a typical Afghan village and is used to conduct simulated police search and clearance exercises.” Yet within four months of completion, the DFR “began to disintegrate.” The report explains “these ‘melting’ buildings were the direct result of the construction contractor…using substandard bricks and other building materials” Unsurprisingly, “this problem was compounded by poor oversight on the part of the responsible U.S. government officials.”

The incompetent contractor was paid in full—a total of $456,669—even though the range “was not constructed according to contract requirements, and…as a result, water penetration caused its walls” to quickly fall apart.

Agents of the Regional Contracting Center at Forward Operating Base Shank, who directed the project, claimed to have conducted inspections during the construction, yet a review of site visit reports turned up “no reference to any of the building deficiencies that resulted in the DFR’s deterioration.”

Only after the range was finished and paid for did an inspector realize that “the facility is completely unsafe.…It appears the contractor intentionally used different materials and construction standards to cut costs or/and fraud the government.”

The ‘Uninhabited and Uninhabitable’ $60 Million Marriott

Eleven years after a plan for a Marriott Hotel complex in Kabul was launched with $60 million from the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), Sergio Gor—chief of staff to Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who chaired the May hearings on Afghanistan reconstruction waste—visited the site. “I walked the halls of this deserted, unfinished shell of a dream,” he said. The structure featured “barren rooms, empty elevator shafts, and no electric power.” The hotel and adjacent apartment building planned by the same developer (for $30 million more from OPIC) today are “uninhabited and uninhabitable.”

Despite being abandoned, the would-be Marriott remains a drain on U.S. funds. “Our government now spends an unknown amount every week to protect these multistory buildings” because of how close they are to America’s embassy, Gor explained in his written remarks to the subcommittee.

“The failed hotel structure now requires 24/7 security both from us and Afghan security services,” says Gor. “Its proximity to our embassy makes it a very dangerous building. If left unattended it could be used to orchestrate attacks and launch rocket propelled grenades at U.S. personnel.” People on the ground told Gor that the embassy was “seeking to acquire the land, demolish the infrastructure, and start anew.”

The real estate development project is an all-too-typical example of “poor planning, no oversight, money wasted, and, the worst part of all, absolutely zero accountability,” says Gor. “Every day that we distribute money, people squander or steal it, and no one is ever held accountable.”

The Electrification Project With No Power Source

Dhawa RezkynaIn its latest quarterly report, SIGAR writes of a huge U.S.-funded electrification project known as the Northeast Power System Phase III (NEPS III). It was a project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), whose “mismanagement of the contract has resulted in the U.S. government spending almost $60 million on a power-transmission project that is not operational because land-acquisition and right-of-way issues have not been resolved, and because there was no contract provision to permanently connect the system to a power source.”

SIGAR reports that “it is unclear whether the system will function as designed” because it cannot even be tested. “USACE officials told SIGAR that until all buildings, houses, and other structures and obstacles along the NEPS III transmission line route have been removed, they will not energize NEPS III because it may put residents at risk.” In March, the Corps of Engineers produced documents showing that it had “transferred a locked and nonoperating system” to U.S. Forces Afghanistan, which in turn transferred it to the Afghan Ministry of Energy and Water.

But that’s not all: In addition to finding no signs the project is capable of actually providing electricity, SIGAR found three of the 18 transmission towers it inspected “on embankments of loose soil and without retaining walls,” and several of the tower foundations “exhibited faulty workmanship like exposed rebar and have started to crumble.” The report concludes that “the NEPS III system may be structurally unsound and pose a risk to Afghans who live near transmission towers and lines, or work in the Gulbahar substation.”

Much of the business press has been in an uproar because Donald Trump has criticized the Fed’s policy of raising interest rates. Trump complains that interest rate hikes will slow the economy and increase the trade deficit by raising the value of the dollar.

The business press is outraged not necessarily because they disagree with what Trump says (although many surely do) but they argue it violates some fundamental principle of government for the president to talk about the Fed. The outraged reporter gang might want to study up some on the meaning of democracy.

First of all, one will be hard-pressed to find any written law or constitutional principle that suggests that it is inappropriate for the president or any politician to talk about Fed policy. Robert Rubin, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary was and is fond of saying that presidents and other political figures should not talk about the Fed.

In this respect, it is worth noting that Robert Rubin was co-chair of Goldman Sachs before joining the Clinton administration and then went Citigroup after leaving his post as Treasury Secretary. Rubin pocketed more than $120 million for his years at Citigroup. Citigroup was at the center of the housing bubble and would have gone bankrupt without massive government aid in 2008–2010.

This is worth mentioning in the context of politicians talking about the Fed because as it stands now, the Fed tends to be overly responsive to the concerns of the financial industry. Its structure gives the industry a direct voice in the Fed’s conduct of policy. It is understandable that flacks for the industry would not like to see its cozy relationship with the Fed threatened by input from the larger society, but it is difficult to see why anyone who believes in democracy would share this view.

There is an issue as to whether we want to see the president or members of Congress directly setting interest rates. My answer would be no in the same way that we would not want the president or members of Congress to decide which drugs get approved for public use. It is appropriate that this authority rests with experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Nonetheless, it is the responsibility of the Congress and the president to monitor the FDA. If it went five years without approving any new drugs or began approving drugs that led to a surge in illnesses and death, it would absolutely be the responsibility of Congress and president to determine how the FDA was exercising its responsibilities.

In the same vein, the Fed is charged with maintaining full employment and price stability. If it fails badly in meeting these targets, then it certainly is reasonable for political figures to be raising questions about the conduct of its policy. The Fed’s structure guarantees it a high degree of independence from immediate political pressures, so no one at the Fed has to worry about losing their job because Donald Trump or a powerful member of Congress is unhappy with their actions.

In terms of the specifics of the complaints, Trump does seem confused. While I would agree that the rate hikes do needlessly slow the economy and put upward pressure on the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, the latter was actually an implicit goal of his tax cut.

The argument for a corporate tax cut was that it would increase incentives to invest in the United States rather than overseas. This means that both US corporations would invest more money domestically and foreigners would also look to invest in the United States.

Reducing the outflow of investment dollars and increasing the inflow from abroad would be expected to raise the value of the dollar. Less supply of dollars and more demand for dollars means a higher price of dollars measured in foreign currency. This would mean a larger trade deficit, but that it is just a logical implication of an increased inflow of foreign capital.

I know Kevin Hassett, President Trump’s chief economic adviser. He would be quite capable of explaining this point to the president if he would take a few minutes to pay attention. (Of course, we are not actually seeing any uptick in investment, the bulk of the tax cut seems to be going into shareholders’ pockets, so Trump may not have to worry about this story after all.)

So long and short, folks in the media should get over their hysteria about Trump criticizing the Fed. (Really folks, at this point in the Trump administration, criticizing the Fed is what gets you up in arms?) He does have a partially valid point about rate hikes slowing the economy, but he seems confused about the factors that affect the value of the dollar.

What passes for religion these days in the USA could be called an abomination. These Hypocrites do not follow their own teachings.

According to 2016 exit polling, 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, surprisingly more than for Christian conservative George W. Bush. This was in spite of the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s inveterate lying, his misogynistic comments and behaviors, his racist statements and proposed policies, his frequent attempts to humiliate real and imagined opponents, and—what should be of relevance to evangelical voters—a lack of knowledge or interest in Christian scripture.

Since the election, white evangelical support has remained high (75%).[1]Again, this is despite women speaking out about how Trump treated them, hush money to a porn star, reports of failing to pay workers, numerous ethics investigations of people he selected for his Cabinet, his seeming incapacity to take responsibility for anything other than his “successes,” and his ongoing desire to humiliate and intimidate opponents.

Only recently, a few white evangelical leaders have tepidly spoken out in opposition to the Administration’s policy of separating immigrant parents from their children. Though, leaders, like Franklin Graham, did not blame Trump. Instead, Graham blamed the situation on the last 20-30 years. Also, these very same leaders support Trump’s other draconian immigration policies.

While some people may view evangelicals’ stalwart support of Trump as hypocrisy, I view it as moral bankruptcy. Let me offer three reasons. First, evangelicals have for decades espoused the view that moral (read Christian) character is a key criterion for political and religious leadership. While Christian voters differ on the specifics, it is easy to assent to the idea that moral character is important for leaders to possess. I suspect people of other faith traditions and agnostics/atheists would agree that moral character is a key factor. A leader’s character was so important that most evangelicals were outraged not only by Bill Clinton’s sexual acting out with an intern, but also by his lying about it. Part of George W. Bush’s appeal to these voters was that he restored probity to the Office of President, overlooking or excusing his consistent lying to the American people about WMDs in Iraq. Two decades later, we hear white evangelicals say, in response to voting for Trump, that they voted for a man rather than a saint or savior, which I take to mean that the idea of character has lost any moral meaning, becoming something that simply refers to eccentricity. In this sense, white evangelicals have gladly and consistently sacrificed principle for expediency, which means that when it comes to political leadership morality no longer matters.

More evidence of moral bankruptcy is seen in the acceptance of or the indifference to Trump’s lies. Of course, all presidents lie to some extent, but Trump has taken this to a new level. The website Politifact, which tracks and evaluates the truth claims of public persons, indicates that Trump lies over 70% of the time. A remarkable feat for any person, except perhaps a sociopath. If we imagine that evangelicals know he is lying, yet continue to support him and avoid calling him into accountability, then it is clear that evangelicals have sacrificed the importance of truth and facts vis-à-vis the public-political arena. This would be one version of moral bankruptcy, which is especially disturbing given evangelicals’ claim to follow Jesus who proclaimed the truth. But it may be that many evangelicals do not know that Trump is lying, despite clear and pervasive evidence that he is. In this case, they are not sacrificing the truth, because they are incapable of recognizing it. They have opted for what Harry Frankfurt (2005) called bullshit and we know bullshitters are not known for moral character. Again, if we turn to evangelicals’ claim to follow Jesus, I can find nowhere in the Gospels where Jesus sought out, displayed, or accepted bullshit from his followers or religious and political leaders. Whether jettisoning the truth or opting for bullshit or illusion, many white evangelicals manifest a moral bankruptcy.

The third feature of moral bankruptcy is found in the notion that the ends-justifies-the-means approach to politics. Over the months I have heard white evangelicals indicate some discomfort with some of Trump’s behaviors, which suggests, in that moment, they are not completely morally bankrupt. Yet, this is quickly followed by pointing to how Trump is getting things done—things they want, such as a more conservative Supreme Court, more border protection, etc. This sounds very much like an ends-justifies-the-means approach to political decision making. White evangelical Christians seem to have conveniently forgotten that this kind of approach was antithetical to Jesus’ ministry and Christian ethics. Indeed, in the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly demonstrated that he would not follow the ways of the world, such as accepting the temptations in the desert or calling on an army of angels to rescue him from his impending torture and death at the hands of the imperium. Evidently, this Jewish carpenter knew that if the means are evil, then the ends are already corrupt. Jesus possessed the moral integrity to know that it is impossible for unjust means to bring about just ends. The means must reflect the ends, which is why Martin Luther King Jr. opted for non-violent resistance. He recognized that violent means corrupts one’s character and damages the soul. Sadly, most white evangelicals have drained their banks of integrity to purchase a sordid character who will help them to achieve their ends.

The idea of the soul moves us to the idea of spiritual bankruptcy, which is the other side of the evangelical sacrifice of principle for expediency. Spirituality is a protean term, but simply stated it refers to beliefs, values, and behaviors aimed at a common good or goods. If we consider the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, we might say that goods are primarily compassion, love of enemies, mercy, and forgiveness, which are represented in Jesus’ solidarity with the poor and oppressed. To be sure, he had harsh words for leaders and wealthy people who exploited the poor, but this, like prophets before him, was aimed at bringing them into accountability and realignment with covenant values. The good Jesus was incarnating was evident in acts of healing, guiding people to God, and reconciliation. I cannot imagine that white evangelicals could so twist the Gospels as to suggest that Trump’s predilection to humiliate anyone deemed to be an opponent, his inveterate lying, and his cruel policies toward poor people and immigrants reflect in any way the spirit of Jesus or the spirituality of a Christian. It is one thing to have a leader who is spiritually bankrupt, it is another to have putative Christian devotees unquestioningly support him.

One might argue that white evangelical’s support of Trump does not prevent them from living the spirit of the Gospel in acts of love in their daily lives. But this kind of mental gymnastics is reminiscent of those “good” Catholics and Protestants who supported Hitler or Mussolini. I am not comparing Trump to these tyrants, though clearly Trump has a tyrannical or authoritarian side. I am instead saying that preaching love, while supporting someone who has little idea of the truth, who loves himself and his family but no others, who humiliates real and imagined opponents indicates spiritually bankruptcy. I am reminded of a scene in Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man for All Seasons.” At one point in the trial of Thomas More, Norfolk perjures himself, placing More in a precarious position. More turns to Norfolk, with some sadness and disappointment, and says “For Wales Norfolk, For Wales?” More knew that Norfolk had sacrificed moral and spiritual principles in order to gain greater power and prestige. More obviously thought that Wales was hardly worth jettisoning one’s character. To vote for and support a man like Trump so that white evangelicals can feel as if they have power to achieve their ends and re-establish their prestige (e.g., Make America Great Again), reveals a common, tragic tendency to empty one’s moral and spiritual assets for the fool’s gold of a false prophet.

Notes.

[1] I need to point out that there are some progressives, like Jim Wallis, among white evangelicals. In this article I am focusing on conservative white evangelical support for Trump.

Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has promised sweeping change in a country fed up with drug-related crime and corruption (AFP Photo/ALFREDO ESTRELLA)

Mexico City (AFP) – Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has given his future interior minister “carte blanche” to explore the possibility of legalizing drugs in a bid to curb violent crime, she said Tuesday.

Olga Sanchez Cordero, a former Supreme Court judge tapped to lead the interior ministry, drew applause when she made the comment at a university seminar on addressing brutal violence fueled by Mexico’s drug cartels, the biggest suppliers to US consumers of cocaine, heroin and other narcotics.

It was one of her first public events since Lopez Obrador, a leftist widely known as “AMLO,” won a landslide victory in Mexico’s July 1 election with a promise of sweeping change in a country fed up with crime and corruption.

“If the United States had a public broadcasting system free from corporate money or a commercial press that was not under corporate control, these dissident voices would be included in the mainstream discourse. But we don’t. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm X, Sheldon Wolin, Ralph Nader, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Edward Said once appeared regularly on public broadcasting. Now critics like these are banned, replaced with vapid courtiers…”

The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher – the maniacal goal of the U.S. government – would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason. It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites.

If Assange is extradited to the United States and sentenced, The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other media organization, no matter how tepid their coverage of the corporate state, would be subject to the same draconian censorship. Under the precedent set, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court would enthusiastically uphold the arrest and imprisonment of any publisher, editor or reporter in the name of national security.

There are growing signs that the Ecuadorean government of Lenín Moreno is preparing to evict Assange and turn him over to British police. Moreno and his foreign minister, José Valencia, have confirmed they are in negotiations with the British government to “resolve” the fate of Assange. Moreno, who will visit Britain in a few weeks, calls Assange an “inherited problem” and “a stone in the shoe” and has referred to him as a “hacker.” It appears that under a Moreno government Assange is no longer welcome in Ecuador. His only hope now is safe passage to his native Australia or another country willing to give him asylum.

“Ecuador has been looking for a solution to this problem,” Valencia commented on television. “The refuge is not forever, you cannot expect it to last for years without us reviewing this situation, including because this violates the rights of the refugee.”

Moreno’s predecessor as president, Rafael Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the embassy and made him an Ecuadorean citizen last year, warned that Assange’s “days were numbered.” He charged that Moreno – who cut off Assange’s communications the day after Moreno welcomed a delegation from the U.S. Southern Command – would “throw him out of the embassy at the first pressure from the United States.”

Assange, who reportedly is in ill health, took asylum in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense charges. He feared that once in Swedish custody for these charges, which he said were false, he would be extradited to the United States. The Swedish prosecutors’ office ended its “investigation” and extradition request to Britain in May 2017 and did not file sexual offense charges against Assange. But the British government said Assange would nevertheless be arrested and jailed for breaching his bail conditions.

The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations. The ruling elites, who refuse to accept responsibility for profound social inequality or the crimes of empire, have no ideological veneer left to justify their greed, ineptitude and pillage. Global capitalism and its ideological justification, neoliberalism, are discredited as forces for democracy and the equitable distribution of wealth. The corporate-controlled economic and political system is as hated by right-wing populists as it is by the rest of the population. This makes the critics of corporatism and imperialism—journalists, writers, dissidents and intellectuals already pushed to the margins of the media landscape—dangerous and it makes them prime targets. Assange is at the top of the list.

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China’s Yuan Is Now Plunging Faster Than During 2015’s…

Another China open, another lower renminbi fix, and another 2 handle plunge in offshore Yuan…

I took part with dozens of others, including Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Craig Murray, Peter Van Buren, Slavoj Zizek,George Galloway and Cian Westmoreland, a week ago in a 36-hour international online vigil demanding freedom for the WikiLeaks publisher. The vigil was organized by the New Zealand Internet Party leader Suzie Dawson. It was the third Unity4J vigil since all of Assange’s communication with the outside world was severed by the Ecuadorean authorities and visits with him were suspended in March, part of the increased pressure the United States has brought on the Ecuadorean government. Assange has since March been allowed to meet only with his attorneys and consular officials from the Australian Embassy.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled Friday that those seeking political asylum have the right to take refuge in embassies and diplomatic compounds. The court stated that governments are obliged to provide safe passage out of the country to those granted asylum. The ruling did not name Assange, but it was a powerful rebuke to the British government, which has refused to allow the WikiLeaks co-founder safe passage to the airport.

The ruling elites no longer have a counterargument to their critics. They have resorted to cruder forms of control. These include censorship, slander and character assassination (which in the case of Assange has sadly been successful), blacklisting, financial strangulation, intimidation, imprisonment under the Espionage Act and branding critics and dissidents as agents of a foreign power and purveyors of fake news. The corporate media amplifies these charges, which have no credibility but which become part of the common vernacular through constant repetition. The blacklisting, imprisonment and deportation of tens of thousands of people of conscience during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s are back with a vengeance. It is a New McCarthyism.

Did Russia attempt to influence the election? Undoubtedly. This is what governments do. The United States interfered in 81 elections from 1945 to 2000, according to professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. His statistics do not include the numerous coups we orchestrated in countries such as Greece, Iran, Guatemala and Chile or the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. We indirectly bankrolled the re-election campaign of Russia’s buffoonish Boris Yeltsin to the tune of $2.5 billion.

But did Russia, as the Democratic Party establishment claims, swing the election to Trump? No. Trump is not Vladimir Putin’s puppet. He is part of the wave of right-wing populists, from Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in Britain to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who have harnessed the rage and frustration born of an economic and political system dominated by global capitalism and under which the rights and aspirations of working men and women do not matter.

The Democratic Party establishment, like the liberal elites in most of the rest of the industrialized world, would be swept from power in an open political process devoid of corporate money. The party elite, including Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, is a creation of the corporate state. Campaign finance and electoral reform are the last things the party hierarchy intends to champion. It will not call for social and political programs that will alienate its corporate masters. This myopia and naked self-interest may ensure a second term for Donald Trump; it may further empower the lunatic fringe that is loyal to Trump; it may continue to erode the credibility of the political system. But the choice before the Democratic Party elites is clear: political oblivion or enduring the rule of a demagogue. They have chosen the latter. They are not interested in reform. They are determined to silence anyone, like Assange, who exposes the rot within the ruling class.

The Democratic Party establishment benefits from our system of legalized bribery. It benefits from deregulating Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry. It benefits from the endless wars. It benefits from the curtailment of civil liberties, including the right to privacy and due process. It benefits from militarized police. It benefits from austerity programs. It benefits from mass incarceration. It is an enabler of tyranny, not an impediment.

Demagogues like Trump, Farage and Johnson, of course, have no intention of altering the system of corporate pillage. Rather, they accelerate the pillage, which is what happened with the passage of the massive U.S. tax cut for corporations. They divert the public’s anger toward demonized groups such as Muslims, undocumented workers, people of color, liberals, intellectuals, artists, feminists, the LGBT community and the press. The demonized are blamed for the social and economic dysfunction, much as Jews were falsely blamed for Germany’s defeat in World War I and the economic collapse that followed. Corporations such as Goldman Sachs, in the midst of the decay, continue to make a financial killing.

The corporate titans, who often come out of elite universities and are groomed in institutions like Harvard Business School, find these demagogues crude and vulgar. They are embarrassed by their imbecility, megalomania and incompetence. But they endure their presence rather than permit socialists or leftist politicians to impede their profits and divert government spending to social programs and away from weapons manufacturers, the military, private prisons, big banks and hedge funds, the fossil fuel industry, charter schools, private paramilitary forces, private intelligence companies and pet programs designed to allow corporations to cannibalize the state.

The irony is that there was serious meddling in the presidential election, but it did not come from Russia.

The Democratic Party, outdoing any of the dirty tricks employed by Richard Nixon, purged hundreds of thousands of primary voters from the rolls, denied those registered as independents the right to vote in primaries, used superdelegates to swing the vote to Hillary Clinton, hijacked the Democratic National Committee to serve the Clinton campaign, controlled the message of media outlets such as MSNBC and The New York Times, stole the Nevada caucus, spent hundreds of millions of dollars of “dark” corporate money on the Clinton campaign and fixed the primary debates.

This meddling, which stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, who probably could have defeated Trump, is unmentioned. The party hierarchy will do nothing to reform its corrupt nominating process.

WikiLeaks exposed much of this corruption when it published tens of thousands of messages hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account. The messages brought to light the efforts by the Democratic Party leadership to thwart the nomination of Sanders, and they disclosed Clinton’s close ties with Wall Street, including her lucrative Wall Street speeches. They also raised serious questions about conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation and whether Clinton received advance information on primary-debate questions.

The Democratic National Committee, for this reason, is leading the Russia hysteria and the persecution of Assange. It filed a lawsuit that names WikiLeaks and Assange as co-conspirators with Russia and the Trump campaign in an alleged effort to steal the presidential election.

But it is not only Assange and WikiLeaks that are being attacked as Russian pawns. For example, The Washington Post, which has sided with the Democratic Party in the war against Trump, without critical analysis published a report on a blacklist posted by the anonymous website PropOrNot. The blacklist was composed of 199 sites that PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half of those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were major progressive outlets including AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. PropOrNot, short for Propaganda or Not, accused these sites of disseminating “fake news” on behalf of Russia. The Post’s headline was unequivocal: “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during the election, experts say.”

In addition to offering no evidence, PropOrNot never even disclosed who ran the website. Even so, its charge was used to justify the imposition of algorithms by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon to direct traffic away from the targeted sites. These algorithms, or filters, overseen by thousands of “evaluators,” many hired from the military and security and surveillance apparatus, hunt for keywords such as “U.S. military,” “inequality” and “socialism,” along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura Poitras. The keywords are known as “impressions.” Before the imposition of the algorithms, a reader could type in the name Julian Assange and be directed to an article on one of the targeted sites. After the algorithms were put in place, these impressions directed readers only to mainstream sites such as The Washington Post. Referral traffic from the impressions at most of the targeted sites has plummeted, often by more than half. This isolation will be compounded by the abolition of net neutrality.

Any news or media outlet that addresses the reality of our failed democracy and exposes the crimes of empire will be targeted. The January 2017 Director of National Intelligence Report spent seven pages on RT America, where I have a show, “On Contact.” The report does not accuse RT America of disseminating Russian propaganda, but it does allege the network exploits divisions within American society by giving airtime to dissidents and critics including whistleblowers, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, Black Lives Matter activists, anti-fracking campaigners and the third-party candidates the establishment is seeking to mute.

If the United States had a public broadcasting system free from corporate money or a commercial press that was not under corporate control, these dissident voices would be included in the mainstream discourse. But we don’t. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm X, Sheldon Wolin, Ralph Nader, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Edward Said once appeared regularly on public broadcasting. Now critics like these are banned, replaced with vapid courtiers such as columnist David Brooks. RT America was forced to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). This act requires Americans who work for a foreign party to register as foreign agents. The FARA registration is part of the broader assault on all independent media, including the effort to silence Assange.

WikiLeak’s publication in 2017 of 8,761 CIA files, known as Vault 7, appeared to be the final indignity. Vault 7 included a description of the cyber tools used by the CIA to hack into computer systems and devices such as smartphones. Former CIA software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte was indicted on charges of violating the Espionage Act by allegedly leaking the documents.

The publication of Vault 7 saw the United States significantly increase its pressure on the Ecuadorean government to isolate and eject Assange from the embassy. Mike Pompeo, then the CIA director, said in response to the leaks that the U.S. government “can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Assange’s arrest was a “priority.”

It is up to us to mobilize to protect Assange. His life is in jeopardy. The Ecuadorean government, violating his fundamental rights, has transformed his asylum into a form of incarceration. By cutting off his access to the internet, it has deprived him of the ability to communicate and follow world events. The aim of this isolation is to pressure Assange out of the embassy so he can be seized by London police, thrown into a British jail and then delivered into the hands of Pompeo, John Bolton and the CIA’s torturer in chief, Gina Haspel.

Assange is a courageous and fearless publisher who is being persecuted for exposing the crimes of the corporate state and imperialism. His defense is the cutting edge of the fight against government suppression of our most important and fundamental democratic rights. The government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, where Assange was born, must be pressured to provide him with the protection to which he is entitled as a citizen. It must intercede to stop the illegal persecution of the journalist by the British, American and Ecuadorean governments. It must secure his safe return to Australia. If we fail to protect Assange, we fail to protect ourselves.